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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28607712">Night Thoughts</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dulcinea_del/pseuds/dulcinea_del'>dulcinea_del</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Expanse (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Porn, F/M, Friends to Lovers, May/December Relationship, Older Man/Younger Woman, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Seduction, Woman Initiates</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 08:35:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,603</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28607712</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dulcinea_del/pseuds/dulcinea_del</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Ashford is determined to heal her feelings; Drummer has something better in mind. (Shortly after S4E8 and otherwise canon-compliant.)</p><p>  <i>‘The black uniform he had designed is still felota, but now he wishes he had taken the seconds to zip back into it. He sees her eyes flick down over his torso, scarred and loosening. “A touch late for visiting hours, Drummer.” He forces himself to smile and spread his hands sideways in welcome, or an approximation thereof. “Been at the bars again? Thought that was only when you were angry.” ’</i></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Camina Drummer/Klaes Ashford, Klaes Ashford &amp; Camina Drummer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Night Thoughts</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So I didn’t see this ship coming either... Caught the look the characters gave each other near the end of S4E8, though, and now cannot get them out of my head. :) Thank you for your indulgence.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He is already in his berth on the Tynan, alone on board, for one last sleep above Medina Station when a notice chirps—someone wants on to his ship. The night is still and quiet, around him only the pale hum of a vessel in dock. Sabaka, he thinks, rolling out of the slot he has slept in for twenty years, not bothering to don a top half for whoever is coming to disturb him this hour of night. </p><p>Tomorrow his ship will be alive again, ticking over with hard beltalowda ready to die for a cause. Tonight he wants only the quiet hours with his ghosts and demons, the family that dwelled and loved him here before all the loss. And he is plenty old now, besides, old enough to crave the nearest thing to a good sleep he can still get. He grumbles himself into the control room, going to the command panels and opening the doors for whichever station sabakawala is knocking this time of night without bothering to bring up visuals. </p><p>“Oye, bosmang.” In strides Drummer, wide smirking, the doors sliding shut behind her. Her familiar stiff saunter, the bottle of the good stuff in her hand again, and this time two small glasses. She is amused. Is it amusing because technically <i>she</i> had been the bosmang of them two, until recently—or because of his exposed state, his irked expression, the welter of ridged red scars and the layer of vulnerable skin sagging like a thin blanket over his chest and waist? The black uniform he had designed is felota, still, but now he wishes he had taken the seconds to zip fully into it again. He sees her eyes flick down over his torso, scarred and loosening. </p><p>“A touch late for visiting hours, Drummer.” He makes himself smile and spread his hands sideways in welcome, or a good enough approximation. “Been at the bars again? Thought that was only when you were angry.” </p><p>She ignores the jab and points at the iron railing, set just back around the control console in the center of the room. “Sit. Drink.” He is a little surprised at her insistence but he obeys, taking the glasses from her as she struggles for a second to break open the seal on the bottle. He notices.</p><p>Her hand as she pours has the slightest of tremors and he sees this, too. He hmphs a bit. “Hitting the rowm hard, Drummer.” But he raises his glass to her before taking his sip. It is warm and golden, like smoke and sweet hay, or his imagination of it, curling into him all the way down. He will just wear his half nakedness like a badge, he decides. Nothing for an old man to prove anyway. Better than acting embarrassed for a slip of a girl—even one who rallies entire stations.</p><p>She grimaces and throws back the whole pour. He winces and wants to tell her na, this stuff really better to be savored—but life is short and lately he prefers to stay out of other people’s happiness. Up close he can see the lines in her face again: the three thin cracks on her forehead where she frowns, the two between her brows where she squints, and the two down her cheeks where she smiles, which is not all that often. She is not really a slip of a girl anymore, he thinks, a little sad for her, for the Belter lives that eat up supple youth and swap it for weathered skin and hard looks in one instant. Still, it has made her strong. It is the most important, to be that. </p><p>She shakes her head, tossing off the burn. “Owwah! This stuff is too good to chug,” reaching to refill herself. Ashford sees this too, and this too is unlike her. </p><p>“Why are you so angry, Drummer?” </p><p>Propped next to him on the railing she ices over, like metal in a cold place. She shrugs and looks away. “Nothing new.” He waits, and she continues slightly. “Been a waste. All of it.” She sips, he sips, she pours in silence.</p><p>Eventually he has to prompt her. “Camina?” He used to, more, but he has not called her that in a long while. Months, at least. Out of respect, he tells himself. </p><p>She sighs loud, annoyed but not resistant. “Like I said before: just tired. Big men and their shit dreams.” She takes another drink, still too generous, nearly a gulp. “Passed grief, I guess. Now, just resentment. Nothingness.” Her fingers tighten on the glass. “And everyone around me still following some dzhemang around, Fred or Dawes or Marco fucking Inaros.” </p><p>Ashford shakes his head. “Not Inaros—not for long, not if I have anything to say on it.” He utters this with satisfaction and is surprised when she turns on him with a cold snort. </p><p>“And you, with your death chase. How is that not following Inaros?” </p><p>He is momentarily without words. In the next second she shakes her head and apologizes—<i>I am not myself</i>—and slowly he relaxes again. She supports his mission, of course she does. They support each other, they two; it has come to be one of the few reliable things he has to enjoy. </p><p>But he can feel the smallness of her spirits still, and it hurts him. This brave young woman with a whole life to fill, one moment quivering with rage and the next drifting and empty. Bold, generous, capable: he has seen her run a whole station from nothing, doing what no Belter had ever tried, handling a tangled people who cannot be handled—and the Inners besides. He has seen her smash her own guts to save lives, his life. He reaches over and places a hand heavily on her shoulder, turning her on the railing so they face each other, and then he brings her in like a comrade, foreheads almost touching. He licks his lips. He is just about coming to something encouraging to say when she leans forward the rest of the way and presses her mouth to his. </p><p>She tastes like rum and vinegar. And her lips are hard under softness, an intoxicating sensation. He pulls back shivering. Dead love, dead child. The burn scars are pink but it has been a long time since his face has been so fully crimson. </p><p>She watches him tightly with those sharp eyes—maybe part drunk, maybe untethered—bright dark eyes that have the uncanny ability to pick up all the light source in a room and refract it, like the eyes of an animal. Her face is very close. He can smell her breathing. A lot of rum, a lot of very fine scotch. For a bare second he glances down to her mouth again, wondering how those taut lips, always stretched in an order or a smirk or a grimace, can be so soft and so hard both together. But that is a mistake—she must see it and misread his wonder for eagerness because in the next instant her mouth is on his again, harder, her teeth scraping at his lips in a way that means he has nothing left but to give in to this bizarre turn of events, opening his mouth to her insistent tongue, her breathing already hot and loud inside him. </p><p>She drops her glass, hands and arms moving to twine around the back of his head. Total, utter madness, he thinks, his own glass still in hand, half-full and held precariously. Is this what the young women do to fill their pain, these days? Dimly he manages a sensible move—slide the glass there, onto the console, and carefully so it doesn’t spill on the control arrays—before Drummer brings one hand gently to his right jaw, the burned flesh hard and ropy there under her palm, and suddenly he must close his eyes and lean into the touch. His breath leaves him in a gust. </p><p>She kisses him again, still fierce, still holding his face with a tender pressure. He is a lost man. He feels hands trail down his body, neck to shoulder to ribs to waist, one side ruined and one side aged. What she sees in him he wouldn’t want to say. In his youth he was hard and handsome and loved a pity fuck though that was rarely enough the case. For a brief second he thinks like a man with no wisdom, no perspective, and wishes she could have known him in his pretty youth. Though, then, they would not have liked each other. </p><p>He moves both hands to grasp her upper arms—has he really been holding her shoulder this entire time?—feeling the muscles ripple wetly underneath her station suit, the thick fabric revealing and concealing in turn. She is like a seal woman from the old Earth tales, he thinks, sent to shore to lead sailors astray. Her fingers hook for a moment under the line of his uniform bottoms, alarming him with their boldness—and then he finds he moves forward, surprising himself, bending her backward in a deep arc with his tongue against hers now, filling and probing and darting away, tasting salt tang and her lingering alcoholic sweetness. He breathes like a bellows. His whole body trembles, his mouth gone wet with desire. </p><p>Then she pushes him away and steps back into the center of the room. For a second his heart pits into his stomach, before he realizes she is undressing, peeling off the layer of dark uniform with efficiency and then dispensing with undergarments, black and grey, until she stands before him, at a small distance, unplaiting the smooth helmet of her hair with a cool gaze. He sucks in a breath. With the braid untucked from her nape, dark hair falls in a heavy, waved wing, past her shoulders, skimming the tops of her breasts. She is shapely almost to the point of desperation. </p><p>So, the look of her alone will destroy a man, Ashford thinks, like this, untied for private viewing. It would not be true to say he has never guessed at this. He swallows hard, coming to his feet and stripping off what little he has on as well. </p><p>Then he is naked. The burns drip all over the right half of his body, licking over the hip almost to his groin. He walks toward her because anything is better than simply standing there cold and unclothed. As he nears she pulls him in eagerly, letting him have another kiss, pressing her body which glows in the ship’s dim light against his ravaged skin. Then she pushes him back toward the only smooth surface in the command module and he lets her, anchoring his back against the flat of the door, under her hands. Her leg wraps around his naked hips, inner knee pressing hard into the tops of his buttocks, her fingers slipping down between the two of them. </p><p>And then she is sliding herself partway out and partway in on him, surrounding him, a limited but mind-numbing motion, out and in, fast and slow—out fast, in slow, drawing out the pressure of her descent so she is tight and wet and hot on him like nothing he can imagine, nothing he has words for. The angle is awkward but he is sure it is the most maddening three inches of motion of his life. The look on her face is fierce and wanting at the same time. Ashford plays for a cool head but his hips have their own mind, rising up with pitiful eagerness to meet her at each half thrust. Three pashang inches. And meanwhile pressing all around him, moving and gliding and twining and pushing off, her supple body with its glory of scars—all ripe womanhood and softness and hardness, the best kind of belta woman, fire under ice under fire. He feels for the silver tracings on her abdomen, the slash in front and the slash behind, and then Klaes Ashford forgets himself—forgets age and grizzled dignity, loss, the warrior ethos, and pushes suddenly away from the wall into a tight pivot so that now she is the one with her back pressing hard into the cold metal panels. He wonders about her spine. All he sees is her mouth. Her lips, just parted—silent, perhaps laughing. </p><p>He hitches Drummer higher on his hips—she is mostly lean muscle, not so light—and eases her standing leg up too to join behind his back until he holds her entire weight pressed into the wall, the taut flesh of her rear filling his palms. Behind him, at his ass, her heels and bony crossed ankles dig in. He feels her loop her arms under his, elbows alongside his chest and hands hooking over his back until she can grip his shoulders from behind with a hard grip like a chin-up bar. He dares another glance at her face as he slides almost his whole length out from its tight sheath inside her. The thin wide smile, he already knew would be there. But her eyes—they burn black, rimmed in their smoking kohl like stars in deep space, cold-hot and challenging.</p><p><i>So show her how this old belta do it then, ke?</i> and he surges forward into her with a grunt, burying himself so deep he feels his stones grind into the lips of her soft moist places. She cries out, loud and throaty hard by his ear, pain or pleasure, and his blood is afire. Much better than three pashang inches. She is wet, shockingly wet. He goes on, drawing fully back and plunging in, bucking against her at a punishing pace, out and in so that at the top of each thrust she makes that noise, again and again, her beautiful low sound filling his ears, and all he can think is how he regrets not having that backroom auditory-record unit installed right into his head so he could capture this, hear this sound always, as if for all the pain and tragedy in this sorry short-long life of his there has been no better aural interval—until it is replaced in his ears by a vibrating moan, pitched slightly higher than he would expect from her voice and he knows what this is too. Every fiber of his body knows, as her legs squeeze like a hard vise around his core and he feels her beginning to clamp down deep inside her, pressing upon him. Dimly aware that he is not what he used to be and every limb is tiring from holding them together, still he clings to her sound, louder, pushing himself, cleaving deeper into her, fast and hard for her until she comes with a roar, his glorious young woman all defiant ecstasy as finally she bites down into the sinewy join of his neck and shoulder, near to drawing blood as she half-muffles herself in him. </p><p>Then he is space dust and barren rocks, the dark vacuum floating. Her moan has drawn up to the invisible edge and rolled over it, a solar flare or a wave, and he holds himself as still as death while the deep flutters inside her kiss at the head of his shaft, milking around him, shocks and aftershocks coming on and on for what could be an eternity. Her moan grows ragged. He wants to kiss her mouth and swallow down her gasps but he cannot. If he opens his mouth he will cry out—Camina, Camina, the syllables to know but rarely to use—and if he cries out he will come into her, slickened and pulsing.</p><p>And he will not do that. There will be little enough tough dignity for him after this; he will not have her thinking back on this unhinged night with a dismissive smile.<i> I made the old man cry for me, fosho.</i> Instead he works just to stand there, to remain still without giving in to the tremble of exhausted musculature. She hangs there for a long minute still wrapped around him, forming quakes and deep afterquakes he can feel convulsing against his hard, unslaked throb. Then slowly she sets herself down—first the worse leg and then the better, then her arms, a calculating extrication. His heart beats like it will pound a way out of his chest. </p><p>Under his palms he can feel the reformed muscles moving where he still grips lusciously into her rear. He makes himself drop his hands—watches as she steps back, pushing the dark curtain of untied hair out of her face, some of it twisted and crimped from the braid, some of it limp now with moisture. </p><p>He sees the travel of her gaze over his bare body—the look of herself coming back to her, her usual fire, extra bright now in eyes so dark and hard with sex. This is it, then. He steels himself.  So, pampa, more shaming to have come when she did and groaning her name on his lips, or more shaming to stand before her like this now, scarred and softened, the naked skin all over pale as the moon rock except the blushed travesty of the burns and the deep color of one part of him, still hard and throbbing before her with his need? </p><p>“You done with me now, keya?” He means bravado, indifference, though his voice comes out hoarse. Nearly a croak, for all that he has not been the one making the sounds lately. Drummer stands there watching him with her chin tilted back, like an arrogant goddess of the old myths, considering through narrowed eyes the words and the things behind the words. </p><p>Inside somewhere she is silently laughing at him, he is certain. She does that a lot. Ashford no longer knows what he was thinking, all this, this felota situation. He should not have let it get started tonight. No midnight drinks with someone so predatorily lovely, even if she was hurting; even if she was, perhaps, his nearest friend. Old fool: mutual friendship and respect, and just like that he lets his guard down. His face burns and he tells himself it doesn’t. Even when she was just a tough little thing trying not to act scared around him, long ago, she was half-laughing at him still, that wordless koyo sneer on her pretty lips like an angry dockside cat. Where did he think this was going?</p><p>Where he did not think this was going: she clamps her hands on his upper arms and walks him back, back, until he stumbles into the railing he has forgotten and almost falls against, twenty-five years of metal presence gone in a flash. She shoves him lightly and he lands against it again, bracing, his prick pointing at the ceiling, stark deep pink against the murky green-greys of the ship’s interior, darker than the pink of his scarred side. He does not like to look down and see himself. Even the black, wired hair here is sparser now, charcoal and ash, he thinks, his cheeks like fire under their whitened stubble, and then before he can say or think anything further she is draped before him, all rangy long limbs and beautiful skin glowing in the dim light of the console. Her soft wet mouth opens and then closes over the very tip of him and she sucks in, hard, and Ashford groans, his hands fisting around the metal rail, trying not to think what she must be tasting, the blended flavor of them both. It is all he can do to breathe. To reach him she bends almost double, the taut globes of her rear swaying in the air in a way that makes him jerk and twitch against her tongue. He dares to set his palms gently on the warm skin of her back, one hand edging to the side just by her small, heavy breast, where the dark ink trails down her ribcage in a twisting curl. He feels her smiling but he no longer has the brain oxygen to care. Then she does the thing with her mouth again and he groans again, a full body clench, until it ebbs enough that his lungs can work once more. </p><p>This is surrender, then. Through the fog of opaque pleasure he manages to reach over to her face. “You don’t have to do this, setara. You win.” In response she just does her little crooked smile and ducks down again, down, down until he swears he can feel the spongy, bumpy surface of the back of her throat. She swallows lightly, carefully, the muscles of her mouth and throat pressing wetly in on him in a gentle convulsion, and he lets out an inarticulate cry. </p><p>He was a fool to ever think he had anything to teach her. “What do you want from me,” he manages finally, still heaving for his breath. At that she leaves his groin aflame and comes up alongside him, stretching out the rich firmness of her body beside his. She leans in, curves pressing partly to him, her face so close that for a second he thinks she means to kiss him again and he parts his lips. “I want to hear Klaes Ashford plead for me,” she says instead in her lowest voice, somewhere between a croak and a purr. </p><p>So that is what this is. Power: ‘twas ever thus, as the ancient inyalowda said. Something to feed the nothing in her soul. Her fingertips dance into the tightened hollow of his throat, fingering down his chest, skating the puckered, crazing lines of the burns, and then down, down, her light touch following the quaking skin to where he most aches to have her. </p><p>And she must be a real master of temptation, anticipation, he realizes. The mere brush of her fingers against his tip, still beading pearly liquid, is enough to have him sucking in aching lungfuls. Her hot breath is just there in the shell of his ear but he hears her voice as if from far away. “Do it. Plead for me, Ashford.” </p><p>Part of him is lost already, madness to resist. The other part glares at her—suddenly incensed, longing and rage and shame and despair all there together. “And what have I been doing, then?” He wants to claw his hands down her back, leave marks of himself there among her white scars. “Do you need your words so much you can’t hear this poor body shaking and begging for you?” </p><p>And then he is gone again, his limbs are not his own, some other aching vessel flipping Drummer around and plunging deep inside her without a pause or a breath, hard enough that she must brace herself against the rail, deep, deep, once twice— </p><p>She twists to face toward him, tangling around his neck and making that sound again, the one that scrambles his gut like a fried component array—</p><p>—three four five six— </p><p>Someone’s limpid voice crying out yeah, please, yeah, yes, a chant, a whine, and he is so long overdue under the strain but if he can just hold to ten, he thinks, then he can do it, he can count a small win, have her singing for him again at least while he is losing himself in her—that delicious voice, ya, yes, seven, eight—</p><p>Ashford gets to nine before his vision goes out. His knees buckle and he holds himself up on her. Blankness, darkness, and somewhere in the distance a man’s hoarse voice cries out for the bold woman in his arms, a name with lovely syllables, and then a thick sob for his own mortality, for brevity of life, beautiful even distorted in vacuums that demand to kill it—while all around him every fiber of his body is pouring itself into her, all of his being spasming violently into her quaking interior, once twice and more and again, going on as if for minutes, total release as total compensation for all the inadequacies of living. </p><p>Then they lie still, breathing hard, sticky and compressed and damp with sweat. </p><p>She draws back first, moving him heavily to her side from where he has half-collapsed on her. Still has words to destroy him. “Not bad, pampa.” A shuddering breath. “Na half bad.” Her tone is light, breathlessly teasing, a cruel thing. </p><p>He looks over at her, exhausted. Despite her words she seems—not calm, he realizes. Ravaged, torn apart, plundered by pleasure and put back together again with a refracting glow. Not nothing. </p><p>And then, who has done this plundering, after all?</p><p>“Words are words, Camina Drummer,” he says finally. “Actions are actions. And yours...” he looks over at her again, shrugs and lets the thought hang.  </p><p>She stares for a moment, then laughs at that—the real laugh, uneven and full, the one that gives glimpses of her rounded white teeth—nothing at all like the little koyo sneers he also remembers. </p><p>She is still perhaps a little bit drunk, he tells himself. It will be too much work, too hard, to find a reason to send her away. He looks at her as they stand and he takes her wrist—together they stagger into one of the crash couches and fall away from consciousness, tangled atop each other in an unnecessary way. </p><p>He wakes in the small hours to her moving around beside him. At first he finds dread, as well as the beginnings of anticipation—he is too pashang old for this twice in one night shit. Then he realizes she is going, actually going, and he relaxes and lets himself feel the tinge of sadness and disappointment. </p><p>She sits on the very edge of the crash couch and braids back her hair, dresses amazingly quickly in the machines’ half light. She knows he is awake, watching her, but they are both quiet. He pulls on his bottoms again and walks her back toward the control console, picking up the small glass she dropped from the floor grate as they pass. Before he is ready for it she stands again beside the door. He hands her back the bottle she brought, not yet half empty. She takes it again without complaint. Who else, now, was he ever going to drink this with? </p><p>He cannot think of the things he wanted to say to her, the hopeful things to lift her spirit, before she had derailed them with her lips. </p><p>“Take care of yourself, keya?” </p><p>At this she laughs once and gestures back at him with her chin. “You just come back from chasing Marco, old man, and we do this again.” </p><p>He blinks and finally realizes she says it almost like an endearment, <i>pampa, old man</i>—says it perhaps to take the sting out of the thing she knows he wears against the world like a shield sometimes. A recent memory of her rises, laughing, teasing him, not so old after all. <i>I see age hasn’t changed everything. </i>His stomach warms. </p><p>He watches her reach out to put her hand on the exit panel, before she pauses and nods to herself, one last considering smirk. Over her shoulder she shoots him a look.  “Who knows. Next time maybe even I scream <i>your</i> name.”</p><p>Something in his chest thuds. Then she is gone—the inner and outer doors of the Tynan sliding shut, and his quiet, still night locking in again on heart, time, memory.</p>
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